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The son of a brain surgeon, O'Donnell was educated at Harvard University and worked as a journalist, mostly for Newsweek magazine. A student in Germany before the war, he became involved with a group of fellow students who were smuggling Jewish and Catholic clergymen out of the country by bribing German border guards. A friend of the Kennedy family from his youth, he once traveled to London to see Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and appeal to him for assistance. The future president's father immediately opened his wallet and handed O'Donnell 15 $100 bills. Arriving in Berlin as a U.S. army intelligence officer in July 1945, O'Donnell bribed the Soviet soldier guarding the entrance to Hitler's Berlin bunker with a pack of Camel cigarettes. He thus became the first non-Soviet to examine the interior. To his surprise and delight, he found numerous top secret Nazi documents still in their filing cabinets. The Soviets, it seemed, were interested only in finding Hitler's body. These documents became the basis for his book on Hitler's last days, "The Bunker." O'Donnell joined the State Department as an adviser on Berlin whehn his friend John F. Kennedy became president. He spent his last years as a journalism professor at Boston University.
